Erewhon : Chapter XVI - Arowhena

Chapter XVI: Arowhena

The reader will perhaps have learned by this time a thing which I
had myself suspected before I had been twenty-four hours in Mr.
Nosnibor's house--I mean, that though the Nosnibors showed me every
attention, I could not cordially like them, with the exception of
Arowhena who was quite different from the rest. They were not fair
samples of Erewhonians. I saw many families with whom they were on
visiting terms, whose manners charmed me more than I know how to
say, but I never could get over my original prejudice against Mr.
Nosnibor for having embezzled the money. Mrs. Nosnibor, too, was a
very worldly woman, yet to hear her talk one would have thought
that she was singularly the reverse; neither could I endure Zulora;
Arowhena however was perfection.

She it was who ran all the little errands for her mother and Mr.
Nosnibor and Zulora, and gave those thousand proofs of sweetness
and unselfishness which some one member of a family is generally
required to give. All day long it was Arowhena this, and Arowhena
that; but she never seemed to know that she was being put upon, and
was always bright and willing from morning till evening. Zulora
certainly was very handsome, but Arowhena was infinitely the more
graceful of the two and was the very ne plus ultra of youth and
beauty. I will not attempt to describe her, for anything that I
could say would fall so far short of the reality as only to mislead
the reader. Let him think of the very loveliest that he can
imagine, and he will still be below the truth. Having said this
much, I need hardly say that I had fallen in love with her.

She must have seen what I felt for her, but I tried my hardest not
to let it appear even by the slightest sign. I had many reasons
for this. I had no idea what Mr. and Mrs. Nosnibor would say to
it; and I knew that Arowhena would not look at me (at any rate not
yet) if her father and mother disapproved, which they probably
would, considering that I had nothing except the pension of about a
pound a day of our money which the King had granted me. I did not
yet know of a more serious obstacle.

In the meantime, I may say that I had been presented at court, and
was told that my reception had been considered as singularly
gracious; indeed, I had several interviews both with the King and
Queen, at which from time to time the Queen got everything from me
that I had in the world, clothes and all, except the two buttons I
had given to Yram, the loss of which seemed to annoy her a good
deal. I was presented with a court suit, and her Majesty had my
old clothes put upon a wooden dummy, on which they probably remain,
unless they have been removed in consequence of my subsequent
downfall. His Majesty's manners were those of a cultivated English
gentleman. He was much pleased at hearing that our government was
monarchical, and that the mass of the people were resolute that it
should not be changed; indeed, I was so much encouraged by the
evident pleasure with which he heard me, that I ventured to quote
to him those beautiful lines of Shakespeare's -

"There's a divinity doth hedge a king,
Rough hew him how we may;"

but I was sorry I had done so afterwards, for I do not think his
Majesty admired the lines as much as I could have wished.

There is no occasion for me to dwell further upon my experience of
the court, but I ought perhaps to allude to one of my conversations
with the King, inasmuch as it was pregnant with the most important
consequences.

He had been asking me about my watch, and enquiring whether such
dangerous inventions were tolerated in the country from which I
came. I owned with some confusion that watches were not uncommon;
but observing the gravity which came over his Majesty's face I
presumed to say that they were fast dying out, and that we had few
if any other mechanical contrivances of which he was likely to
disapprove. Upon his asking me to name some of our most advanced
machines, I did not dare to tell him of our steam-engines and
railroads and electric telegraphs, and was puzzling my brains to
think what I could say, when, of all things in the world, balloons
suggested themselves, and I gave him an account of a very
remarkable ascent which was made some years ago. The King was too
polite to contradict, but I felt sure that he did not believe me,
and from that day forward though he always showed me the attention
which was due to my genius (for in this light was my complexion
regarded), he never questioned me about the manners and customs of
my country.

To return, however, to Arowhena. I soon gathered that neither Mr.
nor Mrs. Nosnibor would have any objection to my marrying into the
family; a physical excellence is considered in Erewhon as a set off
against almost any other disqualification, and my light hair was
sufficient to make me an eligible match. But along with this
welcome fact I gathered another which filled me with dismay: I was
expected to marry Zulora, for whom I had already conceived a great
aversion. At first I hardly noticed the little hints and the
artifices which were resorted to in order to bring us together, but
after a time they became too plain. Zulora, whether she was in
love with me or not, was bent on marrying me, and I gathered in
talking with a young gentleman of my acquaintance who frequently
visited the house and whom I greatly disliked, that it was
considered a sacred and inviolable rule that whoever married into a
family must marry the eldest daughter at that time unmarried. The
young gentleman urged this upon me so frequently that I at last saw
he was in love with Arowhena himself, and wanted me to get Zulora
out of the way; but others told me the same story as to the custom
of the country, and I saw there was a serious difficulty. My only
comfort was that Arowhena snubbed my rival and would not look at
him. Neither would she look at me; nevertheless there was a
difference in the manner of her disregard; this was all I could get
from her.

Not that she avoided me; on the contrary I had many a tete-a-tete
with her, for her mother and sister were anxious for me to deposit
some part of my pension in the Musical Banks, this being in
accordance with the dictates of their goddess Ydgrun, of whom both
Mrs. Nosnibor and Zulora were great devotees. I was not sure
whether I had kept my secret from being perceived by Arowhena
herself, but none of the others suspected me, so she was set upon
me to get me to open an account, at any rate pro forma, with the
Musical Banks; and I need hardly say that she succeeded. But I did
not yield at once; I enjoyed the process of being argued with too
keenly to lose it by a prompt concession; besides, a little
hesitation rendered the concession itself more valuable. It was in
the course of conversations on this subject that I learned the more
defined religious opinions of the Erewhonians, that coexist with
the Musical Bank system, but are not recognised by those curious
institutions. I will describe them as briefly as possible in the
following chapters before I return to the personal adventures of
Arowhena and myself.

They were idolaters, though of a comparatively enlightened kind;
but here, as in other things, there was a discrepancy between their
professed and actual belief, for they had a genuine and potent
faith which existed without recognition alongside of their idol
worship.

The gods whom they worship openly are personifications of human
qualities, as justice, strength, hope, fear, love, &c., &c. The
people think that prototypes of these have a real objective
existence in a region far beyond the clouds, holding, as did the
ancients, that they are like men and women both in body and
passion, except that they are even comelier and more powerful, and
also that they can render themselves invisible to human eyesight.
They are capable of being propitiated by mankind and of coming to
the assistance of those who ask their aid. Their interest in human
affairs is keen, and on the whole beneficent; but they become very
angry if neglected, and punish rather the first they come upon,
than the actual person who has offended them; their fury being
blind when it is raised, though never raised without reason. They
will not punish with any less severity when people sin against them
from ignorance, and without the chance of having had knowledge;
they will take no excuses of this kind, but are even as the English
law, which assumes itself to be known to every one.

Thus they have a law that two pieces of matter may not occupy the
same space at the same moment, which law is presided over and
administered by the gods of time and space jointly, so that if a
flying stone and a man's head attempt to outrage these gods, by
"arrogating a right which they do not possess" (for so it is
written in one of their books), and to occupy the same space
simultaneously, a severe punishment, sometimes even death itself,
is sure to follow, without any regard to whether the stone knew
that the man's head was there, or the head the stone; this at least
is their view of the common accidents of life. Moreover, they hold
their deities to be quite regardless of motives. With them it is
the thing done which is everything, and the motive goes for
nothing.

Thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common
air in his lungs for more than a very few minutes; and if by any
chance he gets into the water, the air-god is very angry, and will
not suffer it; no matter whether the man got into the water by
accident or on purpose, whether through the attempt to save a child
or through presumptuous contempt of the air-god, the air-god will
kill him, unless he keeps his head high enough out of the water,
and thus gives the air-god his due.

This with regard to the deities who manage physical affairs. Over
and above these they personify hope, fear, love, and so forth,
giving them temples and priests, and carving likenesses of them in
stone, which they verily believe to be faithful representations of
living beings who are only not human in being more than human. If
any one denies the objective existence of these divinities, and
says that there is really no such being as a beautiful woman called
Justice, with her eyes blinded and a pair of scales, positively
living and moving in a remote and ethereal region, but that justice
is only the personified expression of certain modes of human
thought and action--they say that he denies the existence of
justice in denying her personality, and that he is a wanton
disturber of men's religious convictions. They detest nothing so
much as any attempt to lead them to higher spiritual conceptions of
the deities whom they profess to worship. Arowhena and I had a
pitched battle on this point, and should have had many more but for
my prudence in allowing her to get the better of me.

I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position
for she returned more than once to the subject. "Can you not see,"
I had exclaimed, "that the fact of justice being admirable will not
be affected by the absence of a belief in her being also a living
agent? Can you really think that men will be one whit less
hopeful, because they no longer believe that hope is an actual
person?" She shook her head, and said that with men's belief in
the personality all incentive to the reverence of the thing itself,
as justice or hope, would cease; men from that hour would never be
either just or hopeful again.

I could not move her, nor, indeed, did I seriously wish to do so.
She deferred to me in most things, but she never shrank from
maintaining her opinions if they were put in question; nor does she
to this day abate one jot of her belief in the religion of her
childhood, though in compliance with my repeated entreaties she has
allowed herself to be baptized into the English Church. She has,
however, made a gloss upon her original faith to the effect that
her baby and I are the only human beings exempt from the vengeance
of the deities for not believing in their personality. She is
quite clear that we are exempted. She should never have so strong
a conviction of it otherwise. How it has come about she does not
know, neither does she wish to know; there are things which it is
better not to know and this is one of them; but when I tell her
that I believe in her deities as much as she does--and that it is a
difference about words, not things, she becomes silent with a
slight emphasis.

I own that she very nearly conquered me once; for she asked me what
I should think if she were to tell me that my God, whose nature and
attributes I had been explaining to her, was but the expression for
man's highest conception of goodness, wisdom, and power; that in
order to generate a more vivid conception of so great and glorious
a thought, man had personified it and called it by a name; that it
was an unworthy conception of the Deity to hold Him personal,
inasmuch as escape from human contingencies became thus impossible;
that the real thing men should worship was the Divine,
whereinsoever they could find it; that "God" was but man's way of
expressing his sense of the Divine; that as justice, hope, wisdom,
&c., were all parts of goodness, so God was the expression which
embraced all goodness and all good power; that people would no more
cease to love God on ceasing to believe in His objective
personality, than they had ceased to love justice on discovering
that she was not really personal; nay, that they would never truly
love Him till they saw Him thus.

She said all this in her artless way, and with none of the
coherence with which I have here written it; her face kindled, and
she felt sure that she had convinced me that I was wrong, and that
justice was a living person. Indeed I did wince a little; but I
recovered myself immediately, and pointed out to her that we had
books whose genuineness was beyond all possibility of doubt, as
they were certainly none of them less than 1800 years old; that in
these there were the most authentic accounts of men who had been
spoken to by the Deity Himself, and of one prophet who had been
allowed to see the back parts of God through the hand that was laid
over his face.

This was conclusive; and I spoke with such solemnity that she was a
little frightened, and only answered that they too had their books,
in which their ancestors had seen the gods; on which I saw that
further argument was not at all likely to convince her; and fearing
that she might tell her mother what I had been saying, and that I
might lose the hold upon her affections which I was beginning to
feel pretty sure that I was obtaining, I began to let her have her
own way, and to convince me; neither till after we were safely
married did I show the cloven hoof again.

Nevertheless, her remarks have haunted me, and I have since met
with many very godly people who have had a great knowledge of
divinity, but no sense of the divine: and again, I have seen a
radiance upon the face of those who were worshipping the divine
either in art or nature--in picture or statue--in field or cloud or
sea--in man, woman, or child--which I have never seen kindled by
any talking about the nature and attributes of God. Mention but
the word divinity, and our sense of the divine is clouded.